I’ve got to get my shoes off. My jeans, too. In this river, they’re more lethal than Jesse’s rifle. I’m reaching down to pull off my left shoe when the flashlight pins me to the crest of a wave. I don’t feel or see the impact of the bullet, but the whipcrack by my ear knocks my heart into my throat. Whoever is firing that rifle knows what the hell he’s doing. I’m a good shot, Jesse bragged, when telling me about my father.

I yank off the shoe and dive, exhaling to bleed off buoyancy, extending my limbs like sails to catch the current and drift more swiftly past the island.

When I surface again, the flashlight is gone.

Unsnapping my jeans, I try to peel myself out of them, but they’re tight even when dry. I curse my vanity, sinking like a stone as I fight to get the soaked denim off my legs. My left leg comes loose, but the other won’t. Kicking back to the surface, I see why. The fishhooks from the trotline have fastened the jeans to my thigh. Two prongs of the treble hook are buried deeply in my flesh. I’d like to rip the jeans to get them free, but even if I could manage to tear the wet denim, I can’t afford to do it-not with what I have in mind.

I pull gently on the central stem of the hooks, and a trickle of blood runs toward my groin. Getting fishhooks out of flesh is a tricky business. I’ve seen my grandfather remove dozens. Sometimes he snips off the loop and pushes the barb out through unwounded skin; other times he widens the hole with a scalpel and frees the barb the way it came in. Both methods take tools I don’t have.

It’s really a question of pain.

My fingers can’t grip the free hook firmly enough to rip out the other two, but my Tag Heuer watch has a steel band. Slipping the barb of the free hook into a crevice in the band, I turn my forearm so that I can jerk upward with maximum force. If I can stand the pain, this should rip the buried barbs out of my skin.

Taking a deep breath, I curl into a fetal position, then explode out of it, yanking my right arm up and my right leg down. The flesh of my thigh rises like a pup tent, and a scream bursts from my throat. Consciousness flickers, and my stomach starts to come up. My brain screams for me to stop, but in that moment I yank still harder, and something tears free.

Afraid it was only my watchband, I right myself in the water and look at my thigh. Where the hooks were embedded is now only a ragged hole streaming blood. It looks like a small, vicious animal took a hunk out of me. After retching in the water, I carefully remove the freed jeans leg, making sure I don’t hook myself again. I’m tempted to let the jeans sink into the river, but that would be a fool’s gesture. This pair of Banana Republics is going to save me.

Treading water with only my legs, I tie knots in both legs of the jeans. Then I put the jeans behind my head, take hold of each side of the waist, and whip them back over my head in a wide arc, trapping enough air in the makeshift life vest to keep me afloat for ten minutes. Then I lay my chin in the inverted crotch of the jeans, with the knotted legs sticking up like the arms of those inflatable figures you see at car dealerships. I learned how to do this on the swim team, and it works surprisingly well. Now I can devote some energy to trying to figure out where the hell I am in relation to the man who wants to kill me.

I’m fifty yards from the island now. All I can see is a narrow strip of beach, but then that, too, disappears. Fifty yards. Only fifteen hundred left to swim. Maybe seventeen hundred

The safest thing to do would be to drift south along this bank for a mile or so, then climb ashore. The problem with that plan is that I’d be getting out of the river at a place called Iowa Point. This isn’t a town or even a crossroads, but only a dot on the map. The nearest telephone lies across five miles of uninhabited swamp. Uninhabited by humans, anyway. There are plenty of alligators and snakes to keep you company. Very little chance of a cellular transmission tower. But if I cross the river, I’ll come ashore less than a mile from Louisiana Highway 1, not far from the Morganza Spillway. There I can flag down a car-which shouldn’t be difficult in my underwear-or easily walk to a place where I’ll have cellular service.

Am I crazy to try it? Most people would say yes. But I swam this river fifteen years ago, and if I did it then, I can do it now. The fact that it almost killed me-under ideal conditions-is something best not dwelled upon. The trick, as I’ve told several people, is not to fight the current, or even to try to swim across the river. The trick is to float with the current and gradually vector out toward the thalweg, or deepest part of the channel. Once you reach that, the river will do its best to deposit you on the opposite shore of the next bend.

Under optimum conditions, that would happen about a half hour from now. But tonight there are complications. Darkness. Rain. Waves trying to beat me to death. A string of barges that I can’t see and that could crush me like a tractor-trailer squashing a mosquito. Any normal person dropped into this situation would drown within ten minutes. But I’m not normal. And at least the madman with the rifle has been removed from the equation.

My makeshift life preserver is steadily losing air. I’ll have to reinflate the jeans soon. Because of the pounding waves, I keep my right hand gripped over the jeans pocket that holds my bagged cell phone. Every time a wave carries me to its crest, I glance around to make sure I’m in no immediate danger. All kinds of debris gets swept into the river when it’s high. The biggest threat is logs. Some float high and dry, but others ride half-submerged, like alligators, tearing the props off pleasure boats and staving in the sides of barges. From the bridge at Natchez, I’ve watched hundred-foot trees bobbing like twigs in the muddy flood below.

Ten minutes of steady kicking move me into the main body of the river, and in that time I probably drift half a mile downstream. Now it’s barges that concern me. Though the last string has passed, others will come, and there’s simply no way to see them with these waves. The front barge in a string carries only two lights: green on the starboard side, red on the port. The push boat itself might be a thousand feet behind those lights, its pilot ignorant of anything happening below the bow of his waterborne freight train. If I’m crushed by barges, no one will ever know, not even the man who killed me.

The sound of an engine penetrates the hissing rain, and it chills my blood. The pitch is too high for a push-boat engine; it’s revving like a chain saw cutting its way across the surface of the river. If it were daylight, I might think it was a chain saw-sound travels amazing distances over water-but nobody’s cutting trees at this hour.

That revving sound is an outboard motor. Probably the Evinrude on the old bass boat I decided to leave on the island.

Jesse has come looking for me.